


Love and longing unequal

by Tanacetum



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Barry undoes the Stolen Century, Gen, and they all lived happily ever after, except not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-25 23:27:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13845267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanacetum/pseuds/Tanacetum
Summary: Barry undoes the Stolen Century to give his family back their old lives.Whether or not that includes him.





	Love and longing unequal

 

Barry found Lucretia in an open field outside Neverwinter. She was waiting for one of her metal spheres to take her up to her moonbase, still under construction. He still couldn't believe she had a _moonbase_. He'd smile if he had lips to pull back over his teeth.

He’d seen the spheres before, once—shattered against a mountain after an unsuccessful test, being picked apart by Lucretia’s people. He hadn’t adjusted to the fact that she had _people_ now. Barry was proud of the woman she’d become under the pain she’d caused him.

She didn’t flinch when he rose up from the ground beneath her feet. She bubbled herself in a shield before he could speak, but he wasn’t there to hurt her. He could never.

“What do you want, Barry?” she said.

“I saw Taako, Lucretia,” Barry said. He waited. She swallowed and held his gaze with a steely expression. But Barry’d known her for too many decades to not recognize regret on her face, even now that it was more weathered and aged than he’d ever seen. “He doesn’t remember Lup, does he?”

“I’m sorry,” Lucretia said, knuckles white against her staff. “It was the only way.”

“It wasn’t,” Barry said. His lich form guttered and Lucretia drew back within her shield. “No, no—sorry, I’m not here to rehash that old argument.”

Lucretia shot him an unguarded expression for the first time in years. He wondered if she could read him as well as he could her, even stripped down to bone and arcane power.

“I’ve got something new for you. Something I’ve—been holding back.”

#

 

Barry stood with Lucretia and Davenport on the deck of the Starblaster. If Taako without Lup was the catalyst for this decision, Davenport was all the reaction energy Barry needed. He understood, now, why he hadn’t been able to find a sign of his captain in years. He was alive, unharmed, but more flayed than Barry at his core.

Very little flickered behind Davenport’s eyes. He walked freely through Barry’s spectral form, undisturbed by the necrotic energy. Barry wished like hell he could hug his captain.

He wanted to ask Lucretia how she could’ve done this to Davenport. But there were a great many things, now, that would go unsaid between them.

“Are you sure about this, Barry?” she asked.

“Positive,” he said. “I just—I never wanted to do this before, because it’s so drastic. Chancey.”

“I don’t want you to do this,” Lucretia said. “Not if the risk to yourself is so great.”

He drew up to her shoulders and draped himself around her. This time she held her staff loosely and didn’t flinch. The Bulwark Staff in her hands was still a powerful artifact, but she and Barry had already fed its fraction of the light into the bond engine.

Ahead of them, Davenport toddled on unsteady legs. The bond engine roared to life under his hands as surely as it ever had. Pure muscle memory. Lucretia had explained that he couldn’t fully perceive the ship. She claimed he had good days, when he wasn’t confronted with so much of what she’d stolen from him.

“I don’t think she’s out there, anymore,” Barry said. “I _feel_ like she has to be—I haven’t given up hope. But, but—”

“It’s been too long,” Lucretia finished. “I’ve had people looking too. One of us should have found something by now.”

“Yes,” Barry said, letting the word drop from his mouth and echo against the empty deck. The light of the bond engine played across the silvered planking and the struts of the hangar overhead.

“Barry,” Lucretia said, turning in his arms. Worry clouded her face under his transparent cloak. “If this doesn’t work—”

“It’ll work,” Barry said. “I’m sure of it. I’ll find you again.”

She squeezed her own shoulder through his fingers. “We’ll—we can tell everyone how sorry I am, together.”

“I’m sorry too, Luce. Don’t think for a second that all of this mess was solely your fault.” Barry glided through her and up to the open ring of the bond engine. Closer than he’d ever gone.

He turned to her one last time, let her see him silhouetted against the glow of the engine. She looked terrified for him. Davenport stumbled back to her side and she reached down to hold him steady.

There was so much that would go unsaid between them. Lucretia didn’t know the full scope of what this would do to Barry. If she’d known, he would’ve cracked under the weight of her concern. She never was able to let anyone else take her place on the pyre.

Barry threw himself into the bond engine and let it spool him out, threads of red and white vibrating beyond this system’s planes. He reached for the Light of Creation.

 

* * *

 

 

Barry catches the Light on the cusp of entering his planar system. It’s child’s play for him to trap it in his spectral hands—he’s held it dozens of times before, after all. He knows how to make it come apart.

He has the luxury of weeks to channel Lucretia’s shield. He still thinks of it as hers, even with all the modifications he’d made hanging behind his eyes. He only needs hours. The glittering white goes up like something out of a dream, smooth like butter spread over the firmament. He wonders if he’s the only one watching this.

Barry turns away from his work. He’s left the entire planar system enmeshed behind gauze, speckled with glowing dots like faint stars. The Light of Creation spun out like bonds, like his own soul had across time and space. Barry thinks about smiling; it looks like a veil, like something the twins would wear. The weave crisscrosses so finely, the Light stretched into millions of pieces instead of cleaved into seven. Bringing it back together should be just this side of impossible. He presses his spectral hand to the barrier and feels pressure. There’s no more warmth than that of a dying candle.

Barry plans to never do anything impossible again. He takes off for the Prime Material plane. When two suns finally resolve to form a horizon, he falls to meet them.

#

 

His career’s considerably delayed. He has to establish a new identity, after all. By the time Barry makes it back home Sildar Hallwinter has been dead for months. Dropped like a puppet with his strings cut once Barry’s soul pulled together at the edge of the planar system. Barry digs a finger out of his grave and decides to leave the rest of the corpse alone.

It’s so much easier to find the equipment he needs to clone himself a body on this plane. The scientists whose lab he breaks into would’ve met him already, had he not been rotting in the ground.

#

 

He’s in town apartment hunting. Before he meets with the realtor, he finds Lucretia. He knew she’d be the easiest. Once they’d all sat under a blue sky and reminisced about the cafes they’d never see again. Her list from home had been very short. She’d found a favorite and stuck to it.

There she is in the corner, pen scratching across paper. He’d know those hunched shoulders and masses of coiled white hair anywhere. She’s got an impressive sheaf at her elbow. Barry grins, happy to have lips to stretch across his teeth.  Even on worlds with technology far beyond her own she’d never switched away from her awful looping scrawl. Maybe he’d go out and buy her a typewriter later.

He buys a coffee and loiters at the counter before taking the plunge. He’s died fighting eldritch armies a few times now. The anxiety he feels sitting down across from her is barely worse.

“Sorry,” he says when she startles. Her eyes are wide and uncertain. “Is it alright if I sit here? I wanted to ask what you’re working on.”

Once she settles and assents her eyes are the same as they ever were. Electrified with intelligence, piercing and alert. He hadn’t had time to get used to wrinkles on her face. Barry takes a sip of his coffee and stares at his reflection in the window to make sure he’s not crying.

“I can’t tell you what I’m working on,” she says abruptly, long after Barry’d forgotten he asked. “I mean, I’m sorry, but I write under—under pseudonyms, for various papers.”

Barry prays he can remember a few of her pseudonyms. Hopefully he’ll recognize her writing regardless. He makes a mental note to subscribe to a few papers.

“That’s okay,” he says. He avoids saying she’s young. He avoids commiserating with her on the things she’d told him in another life—on building up a name for yourself, on breaking out of ghostwriting, on how hard it is to be young and new and brilliant. He doesn’t want to comment on her age. He’s ten years and more than a full century older than her. The gulf between them is wide enough.

“You seem really dedicated,” he says instead. “I’ve never seen someone write so fast.”

She blushes. Blushes from embarrassment, from the weight of his attention. She’ll never know that she has the strength to hold the weight of billions on her shoulders.

That wouldn’t be the last time Barry caught her over coffee. But eventually her career takes off. She moves away. He writes, and sometimes she even replies. She makes it onto TV before Taako and Barry laughs until he cries. Against his expectations, Lucretia becomes a consummate anchorwoman. Her reporting is groundbreaking—inspiringly dignified, galvanized by her wit and reverence for detail. Celebrity suits her.

It’s a long time before she publishes the novel Barry had read drafts of on quiet nights in the Starblaster’s lounge, beside campfires on deserted worlds. He brings a copy to her first public signing. She sees him and smiles.

“Still a fan?” she teases, and for a moment they talk like old friends.

Then the crowd pushes him along. He never finds a chance to speak with her again.

#

 

A year passes from when Barry held the Light of Creation in his hands a final time. There’s no Starblaster. Davenport gets a berth on a vessel running humanitarian missions, delivering medical supplies to villages in distant territories. Lieutenant Commander instead of Captain.

Barry finds few excuses to talk to him. Unlike Lucretia, Davenport is always surrounded by friends. Barry knows only some of their names. He realizes, over the years, that his captain had a lot of stories he’d never told. They share a few drinks together, Barry mountainous and awkward amidst a crowd of gnomes.

It’s a lot harder to keep track of IPRE missions than Lucretia’s public career. Barry does his best, but it’s a struggle to overlap his work with Davenport’s. When Davenport finally makes captain, Barry crashes the ceremony and shakes his hand.

Eventually Davenport retires from the IPRE to one of the communities he’d dedicated himself to. Barry suspects he got married. He sends a postcard and never gets a reply.

#

 

Barry’s wild partying days drag out a lot longer this time. If you call ‘sitting in dark corners of bars at odd hours’ wild partying, which he absolutely does. He makes a few friends, but he’s always looking past their eyes, waiting for someone else.

It takes almost a year to find them. They have enough of a reputation that they have to rotate bars constantly. Barry’s nursing a whiskey and proofreading a paper when they burst through the door. He can tell immediately that they’ve got glamours on, something that makes Taako’s freckles glitter like gold and Lup’s hair glow like fire. They’re magnificent.

He gets in line to let them take his shoes. He still does better than most everyone else against them, even though he hasn’t touched a cue stick for lifetimes—Taako’d shown him his favorite tricks once, on a world where high culture was smoke-stained chandeliers, gilt billiards tables, and fountains of bourbon.

Lup elbows him in the gut and he laughs with her. It’s so, so easy to flirt back. He catches her blushing and wonders if she thinks he’s smooth. Eventually the whiskey gets to him. He excuses himself to cry for a spell in the bathroom, and then takes a leaf out of their book and glamours the blotches off his face so he can slip back next to them at their table. They’re in each other’s clothes when he comes out. He only lets them string him along for a few minutes.

He drinks with the twins whenever he finds them. But they never quite let him in. It’s always Taako-and-Lup, Lup-and-Taako, and he feels more and more like an awkward hanger-on as the years pass. Frankly, he’s too old to party the way they do. He stops going out when he finds he can’t sleep past sunrise any more.

One day he runs into Lup on the quad. It’s a deliciously brisk autumn, the suns crowning the campus buildings in liquid gold. Her hair is dyed a shade of orange Barry’s never seen before. It looks perfect against the violet sky.

She gives him a hug before rushing off. Taako’s teaching a transmutation lecture and she’s off to give a presentation to a grant committee. It kind of sounds like she incinerated an expensive piece of measuring equipment. Barry makes a mental note to tease the story out of her.

 Barry never has a private moment with her again.

#

 

Barry’s heralded as a genius. He squeezes a century’s worth of discoveries into the span of a human life. He’s called ground-breaking, revolutionary, transcendent. He tries so hard to pace himself. But even the dregs, even the faded memories of innovations from a hundred worlds, are still thousands of ideas and connections no one else could ever make.

Barry stands on the shoulders of giants his world will never know. Sometimes he takes his work up to the roof. Between pages he looks up at the stars and imagines the peoples and planes beyond the veil he created to entomb his universe. He keeps an ear to the ground, reads the work of the researchers best positioned to discover what’s left of the Light. Nothing comes of it.

#

 

Sometimes he wakes from nightmares of pouring tarry black, of suffocation, of cold steel sliding between his ribs. Of drowning with the ground firm beneath his feet.

He starts keeping a journal eventually. Lucretia had said, once, that it helped her cope with the stress of transient lives and interminable deaths. He’d taken over from Taako in helping her restack the library in the Starblaster’s hull after Taako turned his mage hand to digging through the journals for old dirt. Shifting hundreds of pounds of paper hadn’t felt like work with Taako doing dramatic readings of the juicy bits.

Barry hides his journal away after he fills his dozenth page. He couldn’t pull anything out of his head except conversations with Davenport, musings on what his captain might say if he knew that Barry had cut them off from the multiverse. Barry doesn’t even know if Davenport still dreams of other planar systems. There is no one in existence who could absolve him of his actions, or even just understand.

#

 

Barry does his best to never write down anything Lup had come up with. She has her own career and he’d hate to undercut her. She’d put a paper out a few years back, but by the time he catches the twins in a lab he has no idea what they're working on anymore.

“Uh hey,” he says, when they snap their heads up to scrutinize him. “Our centrifuge is broken.”

Lup relaxes. “We’ve only got a shitty hand-crank one, if that’s okay. I think we stuffed it in the cabinet—not that one. The one on the left.”

“Don’t deflect, Lup,” Taako says, leaning into her side. She tries to shove him off and they scuffle for a moment. Lup’s stool tips backwards and she grabs the counter to right herself. “C’mon Barold, tell her.”

“Tell her what?” Barry asks. He has the centrifuge in hand and is desperate for any excuse to linger. He hasn’t been called _Barold_ in almost thirty years.

“Tell her that Grimmaldis is too big of an asshole to deserve her.”

Barry chokes. “ _Grimmaldis_?” The guy who stole your fifteen dollars?”

Taako laughs until he turns red. “Oh my shit, Barry!" Lup shouts over his howls. “Even _you_ know that story?”

“Guy’s got a rep,” Taako wheezes. “He’s no good for you!”

“We’re doing fine, okay?” Lup says. Barry’s breath whistles in his nose. “Like yes, he’s an asshole, but I burnt that fifteen dollars right in his hand and it was great. He’s fun as hell. I like a little contention.”

Lup does not like a little contention. Lup had a fling with a catty heiress on a world of perfumed gardens and breezy meadows. They lasted seven months before Merle found Lup bawling on the deck of the Starblaster, charred amaryllis shedding ashes from her fists.

The cycle after the conservatory she lay across Barry’s chest in bed and brushed her lips across his eyelids. He batted her probing fingers away and they talked, really talked. They promised to never fight. They promised to debate, instead, to lay out evidence and counterargument. She’d picked up his nerdy humor the way he picked up her flirting, and they’d both been delighted.

He's still delighted with every part of her. In this life, when he was younger, he’d entertained a fantasy that she’d take him home after one of their bar nights. He imagined—hoped—that he could still wow her. She’d open to his touch, she’d gasp into his mouth. He’d seduce her with decades’ worth of memories and practice. It would seem like serendipity to her. And afterwards she’d hold him, really hold him, and she wouldn’t want to let him go.

But that was then. Still, Barry knows Lup too well to imagine things with Grimmaldis could ever last. He congratulates her anyway and chuckles at Taako’s indignation.

Barry does his best to never write down anything Lup had come up with. But, towards the end, her blocky scrawl had joined his angular script in their shared journals. The lines blur together behind his eyes. He can picture the lipstick kisses and coffee rings she left smeared on the covers, but not the handwriting each equation or theorem was in. He can’t picture Lup’s handwriting at all any more.

He wishes he still had their notebooks to refer to. He doesn’t own anything that has ever touched her hands.

#

 

It’s a blisteringly hot day when he catches Magnus at the park. He sees Merle first, skulking in a bush and inhaling deeply from trumpet blossoms. Magnus has so many dogs at his heels that they can’t all be his—right?

Barry’d come out to doze in the sun. He gets cold so easily nowadays. He burns easily, too, his skin paper-thin and wrinkled. He has liver spots now as numerous as Lup’s freckles. His hair is even whiter than Lucretia’s, his moustache bushier than Davenport’s. They wouldn’t recognize him anymore.

Merle calls out to Barry and ambles over to his bench. Magnus and his eight thousand dogs trot after him. “I didn’t know you two knew each other!” he beams.

“All old men know each other,” Barry quips. Merle laughs and slaps his knee.

Magnus and Merle tell him that they met through Merle’s conservation outreach. He taught a class at the arboretum and Magnus attended to learn more about the trees whose wood he works with. Barry’d been thrilled when Magnus retired from security to apprentice at a carpentry shop. Everything in his apartment, from the cabinetry to the couch, was carved by Magnus’s hand.

Barry gets out a little appointment book and takes down as many of Merle’s upcoming lectures as the dwarf remembers. He knows he’ll have to double check all these dates later. Magnus sticks his hands into the sea of dogs and pets their heads as they bob around each other.

They make plans. Grand plans that they’ll never get around to, but it’s fun to talk. Merle wants to take a cruise and visit the world’s beaches. Some jet set hobbyist on TV had a thousand vials of sand in a rainbow of colors. Merle says he knows he’s too old to start a collection to rival theirs. He doesn’t know that he once had an even better one—mineral samples from alien planets, collected by a team of seven.

Magnus says he can’t travel. He’s everyone else’s dog sitter. This suits him just fine—he’s put down roots. Barry had never known how deeply content Magnus could be with decades of peace and quiet. He talks about building houses for charity, about volunteering at soup kitchens. In this life he had to learn to cook for himself. He says he’s quite good. Barry spends the rest of the conversation subtly wrangling an invitation to dinner.

They part as friends. Barry finally gets to hug Magnus and it doesn’t feel anything like he remembered. Magnus’s arms are thinner, more wiry. Barry hopes he has enough months left to get used to them.

#

 

He tries not to think about what he’ll do when his body crumbles away and leaves him a lich once again. He wonders if he has enough left in him to hang on this time. Sometimes he wonders if he _is_ still a lich. This life doesn’t feel real. He spent too many decades thinking about dying for his family.

He never imagined living without them.

###

**Author's Note:**

> Took a bath, took a nap, woke up and had to write this. Product of one evening. Thanks as always to distractedkat for reading my drafts.


End file.
